Pros
Reno, NV is a great little town. It's cool to write software that makes robots move.
Cons
This place is a throwback to the 1950's. That makes sense when you consider that the company was started by the father of the current owner many years ago. The current owner has no appetite for change and maintaining the status quo is the name of the game here. The place is a manufacturing firm that masquerades as an engineering firm. But first and foremost it's a manufacturing firm. That means it's filled with people who may or may not have finished high school, and they are forced to punch a time clock and be managed as you'd expect a factory worker to be managed. What are the implications for highly educated engineers? The same. You MUST be at work at 7am. You WILL take a 30 minute lunch starting at 11:50am. A bell rings twice daily to indicate a 10 minute break, and everyone gets up and walks around the building. These people did not get the memo that catering to the lowest common denominator is a talent repellent when it comes to knowledge workers. I worked as a software developer 15 years ago. At Hamilton, you can't tell the difference between 2014 and 1999. They are still very much waterfall. Big, up-front design. Heavy, heavy documentation. Using Microsoft Word to document design, architecture, test plans. No automation. Manually QA things at the end of a long cycle. They don't believe in unit testing. They smirk at the idea of pair programming. They barely even talk to each other in the office. They just don't know any better, because the leadership of the software team, as well as half of the software team itself, came from IGT, a local slot machine company with the same stifling culture and top down management style. It's a shame too, because the place has kind of a campus layout, and it doesn't seem like a stretch to get to a vibrant culture with positive energy. You know, like modern software companies where you do lunch-n-learns, hackathons, tech conferences,etc. You know, things to push the developers to stay current with their skillsets. Hamilton does NOT invest in their people whatsoever. And it shows. The talent caliber of the software team is very low. They blame all of their shortcomings and failures on the firmware team and other groups they have to integrate with. Now let's get to the benefits and compensation. They are awful, but to be fair they are running a business and they only have to remain "market competitive". Being based in Reno, NV, there are only a small handful of technology companies to work at if you are a software developer. Hamilton knows this and therefore offers as little as they can. The 401k match? Capped at $1000 a year. Seriously. Vacation? The standard 2 weeks. The difference being that at most tech companies they don't actually track it closely, wink wink. At Hamilton, you have to put in a request and you better believe every minute is being tracked. When you get to work, you swipe in at the door (read: punch a timeclock). At your yearly review with your manager, he will bring up the number of times you were tardy. Combine that with your strict 30 minute lunch break and it feels like high school. Did I mention that these rules apply to everyone? Yes, even "professional" adults. The bottom line is that if you are committed to Reno, and you are the type of person who thinks "a job is a job", then there is a chance that you won't be miserable here. But the software industry is so hot, with companies vying for talent and competing with awesome cultures and compensation packages. It's the greatest time ever to be a software developer, why would you turn back the clock to 1999?
